Kind of a morbid request, maybe, but I just happened to read about a case in which two parents kept their daughter in a cage for at least 4 years. When the daughter was found she was six years old and weighed 16 pounds, estimated to be within a week of dying. The parents are in prison now and the girl was adopted and I’ll probably never know how things are going to turn out for her.
But what are some true, documented stories out there of people who had childhoods just as abusive as this and who are now adults who have escaped from that situation?
Dave Pelzer has written extensively about the abuse he survived and his later life. Note that there is some controversy about the authenticity of some of his recollections, but nothing that has been substantiated.
There was a story in this press about a year ago about an immigrant family in NYC where the father supposedly was so terrified about crime he never let his sons leave the apartment, so they grew up only knowing the outside world through movies and could recite whole scenes from memory. It was pitched as a funny heart warming story, but reading it I was like holy shit that is abusive!
One of the more popular cases I know of is about Genie the ‘Feral Child’.
She was a young girl kept locked in a dark room from the age of about 1 year to 13 years old. The entire time she was strapped to a crib or a child’s potty, her legs and arms bound, and was never interacted with.
When she was finally removed from her home, she was studied extensively by psychologists and doctors, which you might think is useful, but they used her, then actually gave her back to her mother. The same mother that sat by all the abuse she suffered as a child. She was then shipped off to a series of mental institutions and was physically and psychologically abused there, too.
One of the criticisms I have seen of learning anything of use from studying so called feral kids is we don’t know if they were typical before the abuse or abandonment, it could be likely they were severely autistic or intellectually impaired before the abuse, abuse of such kids in the past was depressingly common.
I knew someone who claimed she was subjected to a genital examination by her mother every day from when she had her first period at 11 until she was 16. When she tried to leave home her parents had her committed to a mental hospital. One day, when she was 18, whilst on home leave, she attacked her mother and nearly killed her. It was then decided to give her a lobotomy. An hour before the operation her father cancelled it. Back then people had to wait until they were 21 to escape from their parents’ authority. When she got out of hospital she came to London, got a job, and lived a normal life, surprisingly unaffected by her bizarre childhood.
I kind of think that those sensational stories enable child abuse, because kids who are abused think, “This isn’t child abuse. What A Child Called It went through was child abuse. This is just tough love.”
I am such a kid. I look back and think of it as an abusive childhood, but it doesn’t merit a memoir, at least not one as successful as Pelzer’s. My parents never actually tried to kill me.
Angela’s Ashes is an excellent book. Yes, it’s filled with a horrible childhood, but he isn’t beaten or raped or anything, just starving through most of his life, with a drunk Irish dad who never brings home much money. But it’s clear the parents do love their kids, they’re just ignorant. And it has a happy ending.
Oh, one fictional one: Room by Emma Donoghue. The story is told from the perspective of six-year-old Jack, who has spent his whole life in one room. His mother was abducted years previously, and he was born and grew up in captivity.
